At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don’t know it’s necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren’t.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn’t terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don’t think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I’m disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from “nonbelievers can be saved” or even “nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be” you can infer “proselytizing is bad for the people it’s aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned”.
“The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.”—Terry Pratchett, Eric
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don’t mean that most people haven’t heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who “is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it”.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
I don’t see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God’s will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
It is quite possible that a large number of people...in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It’s better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
I don’t think that God is malevolent.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren’t Christians, but it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding [...] you don’t have to do X. But once you really understand [...] all of a sudden you better do X.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your “best understanding” tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don’t. In that case, a rule that you’re saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don’t.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there’s very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you’re saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don’t hold those attitudes, but isn’t directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity—meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes—definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do.
I bet he can. But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he’s benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that’s what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too
It isn’t “you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved”. It’s “imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement”. Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, “the tinder for sin” (fomes peccati);
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all [...]
I realise that it’s totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we’re talking about right now. CCC’s original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by “splinter Protestant groups” but not widely accepted by Christians. I don’t know what he’d put in each category.
Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it.
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you’re just reiterating your position.
(I think it’s likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all).
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it’s saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it’s difficult now. Etc.)
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said;
I’m not stating a position, I’m observing someone else’s position. “God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity”, when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won’t punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn’t.
I’ve never heard a Christian say anything like “if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don’t stand on your head, God will send you to Hell”.
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false.
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”.
My observations do not yield the same results as yours.
seems to mean
How can you tell? Usually the question just isn’t brought up. I mean, usually what happens is that someone says “isn’t it unfair for people to be damned on account of mere ignorance?” and someone else responds: yeah, it would be, but actually that doesn’t happen because those people will be judged in some unknown fashion according to their consciences. And generally the details of exactly how that works are acknowledged to be unknown, so there’s not much more to say.
But for what it’s worth, the nearest thing to a statement of this idea in the actual Bible, which comes in the Letter to the Romans, says this:
They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them
(emphasis mine) which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
This doesn’t explicitly address the question of what happens if that conscience is bearing false witness and the wrong law is written in their hearts; again, that question tends not to come up in these discussions.
Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it? Because Purgatory comes in degrees, or at least in variable terms, and falls far short of hell in awfulness. So, in those Christians’ view, God has a wide range of punishments available that are much milder than eternal damnation. (Though some believers in Purgatory would claim it isn’t exactly punishment.)
I have also heard, from Protestants, the idea that although you can escape damnation no matter how wicked a life you lead and attain eternal felicity, there may be different degrees of that eternal felicity on offer. So it isn’t only Catholics who have possible sanctions for bad behaviour even for the saved.
(This seems like a good point at which to reiterate that although I’m kinda-sorta defending Christians here, I happen not to be among their number and think what most of them say about salvation and damnation is horrible morally, incoherent logically, or both.)
which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
I would interpret “accuse” to mean “they claim they are violating the law because they don’t know better, but itheir thoughts show that hey really do know better”—not to mean “they believe something is a law and if so they will be punished for not following the nonexistent law”.
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it?
No, the criticism is that either
God punishes people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid (like non-Christians who don’t follow Christian commands), or
God doesn’t punish people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid, in which case the best thing to do is make sure people don’t know about Christianity.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
This doesn’t depend on the punishment being infinite or eternal.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
Hmmmm. Here’s a third option; the punishment for a sin committed in ignorance is a lot lighter than the punishment for a sin committed deliberately. “A lot lighter” implies neither infinite nor eternal; merely a firm hint that that is not the way to go about things.
In this case, letting people know what the rules are will save them a lot of trouble (and trial-and-error) along the way.
I think I misunderstood what you meant by “my criticism”. (You’ve made a number of criticisms in the course of this thread.) In any case, the argument you’re now offering looks different to me from the one you’ve been making in earlier comments, and to which I thought I was responding.
In any case, I think what you’re offering now is not correct. Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
If you are not a Christian, you are judged on the basis of how good a life you’ve led, according to your own conscience[1]; if it’s very good, you get saved; if not, you get damned.
If you are a Christian, you are saved regardless of how good a life you’ve led.
[1] Perhaps with some sort of tweak so that deliberately cultivating shamelessness doesn’t help you; e.g., maybe you’re judged according to the strictest your conscience has been, or something. I suspect it’s difficult to fill in the details satisfactorily, but not necessarily any harder than e.g. dealing with the difficulties utilitarian theories tend to have when considering actions that can change how many people there are.
In this scenario, what comes of your dichotomy? Well: (1) God only punishes people for things their own conscience tells them (or told them, or could have told them if they’d listened, or something) to be wrong. So no, he isn’t punishing people for things they couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid. But (2) making sure people don’t know about Christianity will not benefit them, because if they fail to live a very good life they will be damned if they don’t know about Christianity but might be saved if they do. (And, Christians would probably add, if they know about Christianity they’re more likely to live a good life because they will be better informed about what constitutes one.)
Again: I think there are serious problems with this scenario (e.g., damning anyone seems plainly unjust to me if it means eternal torture) so we are agreed on that score. I just think your analysis of the problems is incorrect.
Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that. It would produce bizarre results such as the equivalent of Huckleberry Finn going to Hell because he helped a runaway slave but his conscience told him that helping a runaway slave is wrong. For a modern equivalent, a gay person whose conscience tells him that homosexuality is wrong would go to Hell for it.
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that.
Do you have any evidence for that, other than the fact that it has consequences you find bizarre? (Most versions of Christianity have quite a lot of consequences—or in some cases explicitly stated doctrines—that I find bizarre and expect you find at least as bizarre as I do.)
I have at least one piece of evidence on my side, which is that I spent decades as a Christian and what I describe is not far from my view as I remember it. (I mostly believed that damnation meant destruction rather than eternal torture; I don’t think that makes much difference to the sub-point currently at issue.) I think if actually asked “so, does that mean that someone might be damned rather than saved on account of doing something he thought wrong that was actually right?” my answer would have been (1) somewhat evasive (“I don’t claim to know the details of God’s policy; he hasn’t told us and it’s not obvious what it should be… ”) but (2) broadly in line with what I’ve been describing here (”… but if I have to guess, then yes: I think that doing something believing it to be wrong is itself a decision to act wrongly, and as fit to make the difference between salvation and damnation as any other decision to act wrongly.”)
I don’t recall ever giving much consideration to the question of people who do good things believing them to be evil, which I take as evidence for my suggestion earlier that most Christians holding that non-Christians may be judged “on their merits” likewise don’t think about it much if at all, which in case it’s not obvious I think is relevant because it means that even if you’re correct that thinking hard enough about it would show an incoherence in the position I described, that won’t actually stop many Christians holding such a position: because scarcely any will think hard enough about it.
47 “The servant who knows what his master wants but is not ready, or who does not do what the master wants, will be beaten with many blows! 48 But the servant who does not know what his master wants and does things that should be punished will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And from the one trusted with much, much more will be expected.
...which implies that, while there is a punishment for sin committed in ignorance, it is far less than that for sin committed knowingly.
(Proverbs 24:12 also seems relevant; and there’s a lot of probably-at-least-slightly relevant passages linked from here).
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider “true Christianity”, and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is “going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation”.
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it’s a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don’t know it’s necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren’t.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn’t terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don’t think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I’m disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from “nonbelievers can be saved” or even “nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be” you can infer “proselytizing is bad for the people it’s aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned”.
“The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.”—Terry Pratchett, Eric
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don’t mean that most people haven’t heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who “is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it”.
I don’t see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God’s will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
I don’t think that God is malevolent.
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It’s better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren’t Christians, but it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your “best understanding” tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don’t. In that case, a rule that you’re saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don’t.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there’s very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you’re saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don’t hold those attitudes, but isn’t directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity—meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes—definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I bet he can. But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he’s benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that’s what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It isn’t “you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved”. It’s “imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement”. Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
From here:
I realise that it’s totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we’re talking about right now. CCC’s original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by “splinter Protestant groups” but not widely accepted by Christians. I don’t know what he’d put in each category.
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you’re just reiterating your position.
(I think it’s likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it’s saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it’s difficult now. Etc.)
I’m not stating a position, I’m observing someone else’s position. “God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity”, when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won’t punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn’t.
I’ve never heard a Christian say anything like “if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don’t stand on your head, God will send you to Hell”.
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”.
My observations do not yield the same results as yours.
How can you tell? Usually the question just isn’t brought up. I mean, usually what happens is that someone says “isn’t it unfair for people to be damned on account of mere ignorance?” and someone else responds: yeah, it would be, but actually that doesn’t happen because those people will be judged in some unknown fashion according to their consciences. And generally the details of exactly how that works are acknowledged to be unknown, so there’s not much more to say.
But for what it’s worth, the nearest thing to a statement of this idea in the actual Bible, which comes in the Letter to the Romans, says this:
(emphasis mine) which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
This doesn’t explicitly address the question of what happens if that conscience is bearing false witness and the wrong law is written in their hearts; again, that question tends not to come up in these discussions.
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it? Because Purgatory comes in degrees, or at least in variable terms, and falls far short of hell in awfulness. So, in those Christians’ view, God has a wide range of punishments available that are much milder than eternal damnation. (Though some believers in Purgatory would claim it isn’t exactly punishment.)
I have also heard, from Protestants, the idea that although you can escape damnation no matter how wicked a life you lead and attain eternal felicity, there may be different degrees of that eternal felicity on offer. So it isn’t only Catholics who have possible sanctions for bad behaviour even for the saved.
(This seems like a good point at which to reiterate that although I’m kinda-sorta defending Christians here, I happen not to be among their number and think what most of them say about salvation and damnation is horrible morally, incoherent logically, or both.)
I would interpret “accuse” to mean “they claim they are violating the law because they don’t know better, but itheir thoughts show that hey really do know better”—not to mean “they believe something is a law and if so they will be punished for not following the nonexistent law”.
No, the criticism is that either
God punishes people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid (like non-Christians who don’t follow Christian commands), or
God doesn’t punish people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid, in which case the best thing to do is make sure people don’t know about Christianity.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
This doesn’t depend on the punishment being infinite or eternal.
Hmmmm. Here’s a third option; the punishment for a sin committed in ignorance is a lot lighter than the punishment for a sin committed deliberately. “A lot lighter” implies neither infinite nor eternal; merely a firm hint that that is not the way to go about things.
In this case, letting people know what the rules are will save them a lot of trouble (and trial-and-error) along the way.
I think I misunderstood what you meant by “my criticism”. (You’ve made a number of criticisms in the course of this thread.) In any case, the argument you’re now offering looks different to me from the one you’ve been making in earlier comments, and to which I thought I was responding.
In any case, I think what you’re offering now is not correct. Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
If you are not a Christian, you are judged on the basis of how good a life you’ve led, according to your own conscience[1]; if it’s very good, you get saved; if not, you get damned.
If you are a Christian, you are saved regardless of how good a life you’ve led.
[1] Perhaps with some sort of tweak so that deliberately cultivating shamelessness doesn’t help you; e.g., maybe you’re judged according to the strictest your conscience has been, or something. I suspect it’s difficult to fill in the details satisfactorily, but not necessarily any harder than e.g. dealing with the difficulties utilitarian theories tend to have when considering actions that can change how many people there are.
In this scenario, what comes of your dichotomy? Well: (1) God only punishes people for things their own conscience tells them (or told them, or could have told them if they’d listened, or something) to be wrong. So no, he isn’t punishing people for things they couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid. But (2) making sure people don’t know about Christianity will not benefit them, because if they fail to live a very good life they will be damned if they don’t know about Christianity but might be saved if they do. (And, Christians would probably add, if they know about Christianity they’re more likely to live a good life because they will be better informed about what constitutes one.)
Again: I think there are serious problems with this scenario (e.g., damning anyone seems plainly unjust to me if it means eternal torture) so we are agreed on that score. I just think your analysis of the problems is incorrect.
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that. It would produce bizarre results such as the equivalent of Huckleberry Finn going to Hell because he helped a runaway slave but his conscience told him that helping a runaway slave is wrong. For a modern equivalent, a gay person whose conscience tells him that homosexuality is wrong would go to Hell for it.
Do you have any evidence for that, other than the fact that it has consequences you find bizarre? (Most versions of Christianity have quite a lot of consequences—or in some cases explicitly stated doctrines—that I find bizarre and expect you find at least as bizarre as I do.)
I have at least one piece of evidence on my side, which is that I spent decades as a Christian and what I describe is not far from my view as I remember it. (I mostly believed that damnation meant destruction rather than eternal torture; I don’t think that makes much difference to the sub-point currently at issue.) I think if actually asked “so, does that mean that someone might be damned rather than saved on account of doing something he thought wrong that was actually right?” my answer would have been (1) somewhat evasive (“I don’t claim to know the details of God’s policy; he hasn’t told us and it’s not obvious what it should be… ”) but (2) broadly in line with what I’ve been describing here (”… but if I have to guess, then yes: I think that doing something believing it to be wrong is itself a decision to act wrongly, and as fit to make the difference between salvation and damnation as any other decision to act wrongly.”)
I don’t recall ever giving much consideration to the question of people who do good things believing them to be evil, which I take as evidence for my suggestion earlier that most Christians holding that non-Christians may be judged “on their merits” likewise don’t think about it much if at all, which in case it’s not obvious I think is relevant because it means that even if you’re correct that thinking hard enough about it would show an incoherence in the position I described, that won’t actually stop many Christians holding such a position: because scarcely any will think hard enough about it.
I’ve found a few other passages that seem to have a bearing on this question.
Luke 12:47-48 states:
...which implies that, while there is a punishment for sin committed in ignorance, it is far less than that for sin committed knowingly.
(Proverbs 24:12 also seems relevant; and there’s a lot of probably-at-least-slightly relevant passages linked from here).
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider “true Christianity”, and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is “going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation”.
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it’s a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.